


Exteriors

by mithborien



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-17
Updated: 2006-08-17
Packaged: 2017-10-19 14:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/201765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mithborien/pseuds/mithborien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re just as screwed up as each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Exteriors

Sirius doesn’t have any scars.

It’s strange, Remus thinks, as he watches his old friend putter around the empty house. Considering what he’s been through: the misadventures of youth, fighting in a war they weren’t ready for and twelve years of prison when innocent, yet Sirius’ skin is still as smooth as it was when he was young.

Granted, his hair is always matted and tangled and his bones stick out too much. His skin and muscles look like they’ve been stretched to far and his movements are just a little bit awkward. But he could pull off that charismatic black charm if he didn’t have that dead look in his eyes.

Good food has filled him out, putting in a hard days work fixing up the old house has brought the colour back to his face and good, casual conversation means he laughs every other day.

It’s almost unfair, Remus thinks, that Sirius is recovering so quickly. He feels guilty for thinking it but he can’t help it. It was always easy for Sirius to bounce back from difficulty whereas Remus always had to fight so hard to climb out of the gutter. He never had a family to take him in when no one else would and he didn’t have a best friend to stand by him. They’re all dead now and Remus has had to struggle through by himself.

And he has the marks to show for it

There’s the blistered skin on his side, just under his ribs from a curse thrown by a Death Eater in the first real duel he ever fought. When he was young and scared and wasn’t sure he could kill someone even in self defence.

There’s a scar on his knee from when he kicked through a glass window trying to escape from what could only be called a mob when they found out he was a werewolf. Sleepy towns in the countryside aren’t as peaceful or as easy to hide in as one would have thought and running for ten minutes with a piece of glass in your knee is more painful than you could imagine.

There are the claw marks on his back from a fellow werewolf who thought Remus was an Auror trying to arrest him. Human nails can dig just as deep as a wolf’s and the obscenities that had been thrown at Remus were ironic enough to make him laugh and do nothing else.

And he can still trace out the cuts across his palm from where he clutched a glass too hard and it shattered in his hands when he found out James and Lily had been killed. The marks have all but faded now but he can still remember exactly how the scatches had curved across his skin.

There’s also the jagged line on his forearm, the circle of puckered skin on his shoulder, the way his joints are stiff in the morning and the way his back cracks when he stands up.

Not to mention the teeth marks in his skin that Remus won’t ever talk about, won’t even look at when he undresses and the marks left by monthly transformations. Those aren’t scars. Scars are supposed to mean something and have a story behind them. Remus doesn’t want to remember those stories.

But Sirius wants to remember and he does between the bouts of depressions and the occasional nights of drink. He remembers the days from school when two used to be four and they were mindlessly happy. He smiles when he recalls school day exploits and he smiles when he looks at his god son.

Remus can’t look at Harry without remembering James.

Remus has had fourteen years to get better but he hasn’t managed it yet. He hasn’t held a job for longer than a year, hasn’t kept lodging for the same amount of time and no relationship has lasted more than three weeks.

Remus has a network of scars across his body that do nothing but highlight everything that has gone wrong with his life and he can’t help but resent that Sirius is getting better every day when Remus has to struggle.

But then Remus looks into Sirius’ eyes, sees the darkness and the recriminations and the regret and remembers that despite appearances they were always just as screwed up as each other.


End file.
